Enforced. Emerson says: “Do not hang a dismal picture on your wall, and do not deal with sable and gloom in your conversation.” Beecher follows: “Away with these fellows who go howling through life, and all the while passing for Birds of Paradise. He that cannot laugh and be gay, should look to himself.

He should fast and pray until his face 30 SERMON ILLUSTRATIONS breaks forth into light.” Talmage then takes up the strain: “Some people have an idea that they comfort the afflicted when they groan over them.

Don’t drive a hearse through a man’s soul. When you bind up a broken bone of the soul, and you want splints, do not make them out of cast iron.”

Hume, the historian, said that the habit of looking at the bright side of things was better than an income of a thousand a year. It was said of Cromwell that hope shone like a fiery pillar in him when it had gone out in all others.